Data Compression

Data compression is the compacting of info by decreasing the number of bits that are stored or transmitted. In this way, the compressed information requires much less disk space than the original one, so more content can be stored on identical amount of space. You can find various compression algorithms which work in different ways and with a lot of them only the redundant bits are erased, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no decrease in quality. Others delete unnecessary bits, but uncompressing the data subsequently will lead to reduced quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content requires a significant amount of system resources, especially CPU processing time, therefore every hosting platform that uses compression in real time should have enough power to support that attribute. An example how info can be compressed is to substitute a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of consecutive 1s or 0s there should be instead of keeping the entire code.

Data Compression in Website Hosting

The ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm called LZ4. The aforementioned is considerably faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, especially for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data quicker than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the overall performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. As the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that very quickly, we're able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the website hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will require less space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work extremely fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web hosting servers where your content will be stored.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created on a cloud platform which runs using the cutting-edge ZFS file system. The latter uses a compression algorithm called LZ4, which is significantly better than various other algorithms regarding compression ratio and speed. The gain is significant especially when data is being uncompressed and not only is LZ4 much faster than other algorithms, but it is also faster in uncompressing data than a system is in reading from a hard disk. Because of this Internet sites running on a platform that uses LZ4 compression perform better because the algorithm is most efficient when it processes compressible data i.e. site content. Another advantage of using LZ4 is that the backup copies of the semi-dedicated accounts that we keep require a lot less space and they're generated quicker, which allows us to store several daily backups of your files and databases.